Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi is operating on the thinnest of margins to keep its handset prices low, according to a filing with the Shenzhen Stock Exchange.
The Chinese phone-maker, that’s creeping up on Western manufacturers, made a profit of $56.2m on $4.3bn in revenue last year. That gives the firm operating margins of …

Weaker margins in Europe due to forex losses and cut-throat retail pricing was the only major blip in an otherwise decent end to the calendar 2014 for Ingram Micro. It was not a vintage year though.
Sales in Q4 bounced 18 per cent to $13.95bn: Technology and Other Solutions grew ten per cent to $11.2bn and Mobility shot up 60 …

Fanbois hoping to upgrade their Apple streaming set-top box to a fully fledged Apple TV set will have been disheartened by revelations in a new book claiming Steve Jobs did not support building an iTelly.
According to former WSJ journo Yukari Iwatani Kane's book Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs, the fruity führer …

Apple has beaten some of the gloomier analyst expectations in its second quarter's results filing, with revenues of $43.6bn for the quarter generating $9.5bn in profits. But margins are falling and the company warned that next quarter it may clear only $33.5bn to $35.5bn in revenues – its biggest fall in a decade.
The company …

Bytes Technology Group's (BTG) top line took a hammering in fiscal 2012 ended February from the loss of a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement with the NHS – but efforts to push up gross margins boosted the bottom line.
The Surrey-based reseller saw sales fall 16 per cent to £125m for the 12 months as two NHS true-ups in the previous …

Acquisition-hungry Advanced Computer Software (ACS) has itself been acquired by private equity firm Vista for £725m.
Vin Murria, chief executive of the healthcare and biz management software and services firm, said the deal would help ACS move to its "next stage of its growth".
She said: "ACS' value has grown from £32m to £725m …

Worstall on Wednesday
The lads over at Business Insider seem to be getting a little over-excited about Xiaomi's latest fund raising exercise, claiming in their headline that it's the Apple of China. Well, no, not really, Apple is the Apple of China. Making cute kit and selling it in volume isn't the definitive point about Apple itself so a company …

Ofcom is attempting to clip BT’s financial wings by proposing to regulate the margins it banks from superfast broadband sales to consumers, essentially to prevent the firm from future profiteering and elbowing rivals out of the market.
The Brit telco monopoly is the largest provider of fibre broadband services over its network …

NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson has attributed last week's estimates-busting results are partly due to enthusiasm for cloudy software, but also partly due to difficulties finding people to hire.
The company hauled in US$143.7 million for the quarter, a small matter of 34 per cent more than the corresponding quarter in 2013. But the …

Manufacturers are cutting their margins to the bone, and getting a subsidy from Intel, in an effort to make ultrabooks more affordable.
Acer, Asustek Computer and Toshiba may be able to put out hardware below the critical $1,000 mark, unnamed sources told DigiTimes, and by 2012 prices could drop by up to 10 per cent. Intel is …

Lenovo is attempting to defuse controversy over its pre-installed Superfish crapware – which appears to have run man-in-the-middle attacks against consumers in order to sling ads – by saying it has discontinued use of the visual-recognition technology on new laptops and promising to review outstanding concerns.
Superfish …

Seagate’s second quarter revenues for 2015 rose 4.8 per cent over the year to $3.7bn while profits more than doubled to $933m, up from $428m a year ago.
Last quarter’s revenues were higher, at $3.8bn, yet profits were $381m. This meant they made up just 10.1 per cent of its revenues compared to 25.2 per cent profit in the latest …

Analysis
Formidably troubled storage outfit Imation, the company dragged down by delayed exits from the tape and optical media markets, has recorded a third quarter loss 76 per cent worse than last year on revenues just nine per cent down on the year.
The third 2014 quarter saw revenues of $175m, compared to $178.6m a quarter ago and $ …

Chinese tech giant Xiaomi racked up 74.3bn yuan ($11.97bn) in pre-tax revenue last year, the company's president Bin Lin said today.
The vendor apparently had a mega 135 per cent growth spurt in 2014, after it sold more than 61 million smartphones during the 12-month period.
Xiaomi's co-founder didn't offer any details on …

Sales at US computer giant CSC dropped 8.7 per cent to $2.95bn (£1.9bn) for its third quarter - around $150m (£98.6m) below what the company had hoped.
The company also recorded an income loss of $313m (£206m) for the third quarter, which was affected by pre-tax pension-related charges of $462m (£303m) and a $195m (£128m) charge …

Phone sales helped network equipment giant Huawei to bank 20 per cent more revenue in 2014 than the previous year, the company said today in an earnings guidance.
The Chinese company estimates sales for the 12 months to come in at between ¥287-289bn (£30.3bn to £30.9bn) when the final numbers for calendar ’14 are reported in …

Microsoft shipped a record number of Lumia smartphones in the final quarter of calendar year 2014, as Surface revenue finally started to make an impression.
Microsoft reported that 10.5 million Lumias shipped, the most in a quarter, on the strength of low-cost devices. However, to put that in perspective, Samsung sold over 78 …

Patrick Zammit, the latest exec to grab global control of Avnet Technology Solutions (ATS), will be close at hand from his Brussels base to mastermind a sustained growth plan in EMEA, something that continues to elude the firm.
A former senior auditor at Arthur Anderson - like many beanies now working in the channel - Zammit …

Microsoft’s advice to its channel partners to sell Office 365 as a loss leader to lure in small and medium sized customers is not something that sits well with suppliers, at least not in Blighty.
Thomas Hansen, worldwide veep for Microsoft's Small and Medium Business organisation told attendees at the Asian Canalys Channels …

The banking industry - on average - coughed the highest margins for technology in 2013, doubtless indicating that champagne-guzzling fatcats drunk on bonuses were the ones in charge of purchasing.
A survey of 200 procurement and ICT managers in 12 sectors with annual budgets over £50k and based on some 150,000 products showed …

The prognosis for Northamber’s future is brighter, according to its colourful chairman, despite widening losses and revenues remaining in free fall for fiscal ’14 ended June.
The AIM-listed tech distie - the oldest in Blighty - reported prelim sales of £62.8m, down a whopping 19 per cent year-on-year, and a loss from operations …

Amazon.com has become the latest outfit to decide copying Dropbox is a fine idea, further cloudifying its Cloud Drive with a desktop client that does the usual store 'n' synch between multiple devices while also offering some interesting insights into cloud economics.
The nominally-profitable online retailer has operated Cloud …

The phrase "turnover is vanity, profit is sanity" apparently does not apply to the tech sector, with PwC advising companies this year to focus on revenue growth above margins and "yield maximum shareholder value".
According to the report 2015 Technology Industry Trends this is particularly important in a "volatile market", which …

IBM has released a trio of enterprise applications for iOS devices, as part of its Businesslab partnership with Apple.
Big Blue's three new iOS apps offer tools for customer service tasks and remote working, two areas that IBM and Apple cited as keys last year when they announced their joint effort to put IBM business software …

Top Chinese mobile phone manufacturer Xiaomi has confirmed reports that it has raised $1.1bn to fund its plans for world domination.
In a Facebook Post, president and co-founder Bin Lin said:
We just completed the latest round of funding last week, raising US$1.1 billion at valuation of US$45 billion. Investors include All- …

It is almost a year since Steve Vaughan grabbed control of Phoenix IT Group, and the once-troubled tech services outfit no longer seems so ... well, troubled.
The LSE-listed Northampton company issued an interim today to say group trading is “comfortably in line with market profit expectations”, and talked up a number of …

Huawei claims to have banked over $11bn in smartphone revenue in 2014 despite falling short of its volume prediction.
Consumer chief Richard Yu says the Chinese giant shifted 75 million units in the year, a little short of the 80 million it had predicted - but still up 40 per cent from 2013, the WSJ reports.
Three of the top …

Ericsson's flat sales last year were the result of its disappointing fourth quarter, especially in America, its latest financial results show.
The Swedish company is still the biggest supplier of mobile network infrastructure in the world, and in the fourth quarter it saw strong sales growth in the Middle East, Asia and Europe …

Throwing costs overboard, smaller interest repayments and walking away from lower-margin business beautified Ingram Micro UK’s bottom line in calendar ’13, as its latest Companies House filing reveals.
The Milton Keynes-based biz reported turnover of £968.5m, up 2.15 per cent, or 1.4 per cent when inter-group trade (£36.7m) was …

You may not think being a mobile phone customer in Britain is much fun, what with rural Not Spots, the world's most irritating advertising campaigns*, and LTE arriving later (and rolling out slower) than anywhere else. Readers are quick to complain.
But you actually get a better deal than you think. So enjoy it while you can, …

Open ... and Shut
There are a million ways to over-analyse iOS versus Android market share, but one thing is often overlooked: Apple's high-margin strategy depends upon buying customers through subsidies, and may not be able to keep pace with Android's low-cost model over time.
Google's Android growth - 250 per cent in 2011 - is particularly …

Revenue at CSC fell by 3.4 per cent to $3.08bn for the firm's second quarter as "transformation efforts" took hold at the IT giant.
Meanwhile, operating income fell 3.3 per cent compared to the same period last year – to $340m. Half-year net income fell by $112m to $307m, compared with the first six months of 2013.
Sales were …

Samsung has decided to stop pushing its light emitting diode business outside of South Korea, despite reckoning it would be a growth area a few years ago.
Like Philips, Sammy has realised that LED is not, after all, where it’s at, and it will be shutting the unit down overseas.
Philips recently announced it would be spinning …

Comment
When is Big Blue's storage slide going to end? IBM's latest quarterly and full year fiscal 2014 results show an unabated fall in storage hardware revenues, with an eight per cent annual decline to $864m in the fourth quarter of 2014.
It's a huge number, but back in fiscal 2011 the same quarter recorded $1.2bn in storage hardware …

Lenovo has finally got its hands on IBM’s volume server business in Europe months after the transaction closed in the rest of the world, and the comparatively hard work now begins in earnest.
The transfer of the System X division to the new Chinese owners happened for most last October but was delayed in the fragmented European …

A FTSE100 company has handed ailing cloudy biz Outsourcery an early Crimbo gift by signing a three-year contract worth an estimated £1.1m to rip out its ageing telephony system in favour of "voice services".
It's been one hell of a year for the Manchester-based software-as-a-service and online infrastructure seller, co-founded …

Execs at Chinese hardware maker Huawei are laughing all the way to the bank after reporting a healthy bounce in revenues and margins, despite being effectively blockaded by some governments in the West.
The maker of telco kit, smartphones and enterprise networking gear today said that turnover for the first half of calendar '14 …

As already reported here at El Reg, Apple is being investigated by the EU over its tax “deal” in Ireland.
The interesting part of the whole story is that it has pretty much nothing at all to do with all of the things that people normally complain about concerning Apple's taxes.
It isn't, for example, about the way that the …

Samsung's mobile phone businesses took a nasty tumble in 2014's fourth quarter, with profits at the company's electronics division falling by 27 per cent to 5.35 trillion won ($4.9bn).
Samsung Electronics makes all manner of gadgetry, much used by other electronics companies in their own products. But attention has focussed on …

Analysis
It's tough being a victim of your own business strategy, especially if you're Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.
After spending twenty years applying a combination of price cuts, smart logistics, and ruthless efficiency to the publishing and music industries, Bezos' Amazon has grown into a vast company.
But now the company's …

Industry and distribution veteran Johnny Ellis has crossed into reseller land for the first time, rocking up as sales and marketing director at York-based Microsoft enterprise licensing partner Phoenix Software.
Ellis, who only exited Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions at the end of November, will also control the S&M …

Logicalis is locked in recovery mode following the sales crash during last year’s World Cup and the loss of the Wales PSN contract to BT, but it is the Westcon distribution arm of parent Datatec that is really motoring.
The group, listed on both AIM and South Africa's Johannesburg Stock Exchange, reiterated today in an interim …

Murdering the PC building biz was always going to result in some top-line slippage for Brit specialist education tech supplier RM, but the move to shutter the production line hasn't hurt profits, quite the opposite.
The Oxford-based biz today reported half-year numbers to 31 May with sales down more than 22 per cent to £92.1m …

Worstall on Wednesday
Given that I'm writing this before the great unveil and you'll be reading it afterwards, there's much that could go wrong with my prognostications. Tim Cook could stand up this afternoon and announce the iBurger and claim that the days of Maccy D's are over. True, that's unlikely, but in an infinite universe everything will …

Sales of the Galaxy S5 have so disappointed Samsung that it is reportedly looking at ousting mobile boss JK Shin and parachuting in appliances and telly tsar BK Yoon – who would oversee mobiles as well as his existing remit.
Whichever way you cut it, the S5 has done badly:revenue, margins, year-on-year sales against the S4 or …

US telco CenturyLink is said to be considering an attempt to acquire Rackspace, according to Bloomberg.
The newswire's report is sparse: nobody is saying anything concrete and folks familiar with the situation are the source.
Let's try to guess what's afoot here. CenturyLink already operates a 57-strong global bit barn network …

China's data centre kit-providers will take two per cent of the global market from current suppliers, according to newly-released Gartner research titled “Four Highly Disruptive Factors Will Challenge the Survival of Incumbent Data Center Market Vendors.”
Gartner says China will advance because it is “buoyed by deep resources” …

It was more bad news for Samsung in the third quarter of 2014, as the Korean smartphone maker saw its global market share shrink by nearly 8 per cent, year on year, with most of it going to Chinese rivals.
According to the latest figures from Gartner, Samsung remains the worldwide smartphone king, but its market share was just …

Microsoft reported flat revenues and shrinking profits for the third quarter of its fiscal 2014, but that was still better news than the analysts were expecting to hear.
On average, the Wall Street wizards polled by Yahoo! Finance were betting Redmond would take in revenues of $20.39bn for the three months ending March 31, with …

Exclusive
More pieces of HP’s management puzzle are being slotted into place at a country and regional level, ahead of the major split in the corporation planned for October.
As world + dog knows, the PC and print businesses are to separate from the rest of the organisation to create HP Inc, with all other divisions falling under Hewlett …